Life In A Fishbowl

I have always been different. I have always been extremely tall(6ft2in now), and on the chubby side. I am intelligent, and an artist. I also came out as bisexual when I was 14. On top of everything, I moved around a TON growing up. My father was schizophrenic, and my mother was always too wrapped up in herself to pay me any mind. Seeing these kids on the screen, well, that was me. There were many years that I didn't have a single friend. I would come home from junior high for months just covered in bruises, because high school boys would throw apples at me after we got off the school bus. They would call me the jolly gay giant, lurch, and many others. It never ended. It never got better. Nobody cared about me.

As time went on, I just quit telling the teachers. In all actuality, the teachers bullied me too. I never got cast for anything because I was too fat and tall, and because I wasn't popular. I never was in a play, even though I auditioned for every single one. I never sang a solo, even though I could sing them all perfectly. None of my tormentors ever got any punishment, because it always seemed to be my fault. I also had no idea how to relate to other people when I was a kid. I didn't know what was wrong with me, I just knew I was different, and so did everybody else.

It finally came to a precipice, when in my sophomore year of high school, I got drug to the middle of a tiny town in Montana, by my non caring mother. A place where people who are even slightly different get beaten, stabbed, their homes vandalized, and probably even killed at one point or another. I faded through the cracks, as kids pushed me in to lockers, called me a tranny because of my height, and once spray painted my best friends car with a nice, big, DYKE LOVER on the side of it.

So at the beginning of my junior year I left. I left the pain, I left the place that I was supposed to be learning, and the place that had become my prison. I would cry to my mom to not make me go to school, and eventually, she let me quit going. She didn't want to fight with her weird daughter, because she was a simple woman, and didn't know what to do. So she let me give up. But it still didn't get better. You see, living in a small town, I got to see all the people I went to school with in every single place I went. I was 17, an outcast with no friends, and nothing but pain in my heart. Then, I ran.

I was 17 years old, and I ran. I ran away from the cesspool that tried to drag me in so many times before. The town that I had lived in for two short years, and attempted suicide 4 times. The home where my mother just wanted a normal family, and I didn't fit in to her image of that. The people who had threatened my life countless times, but had crushed my spirit for the last time. I ran to a new place, with new people, and a whole new life.

Then, I began to live. I got outside of the whirling vortex of hatred, into the world of loving and accepting adults. I began to travel the country as a singer and musician, I made art everywhere I went and sold paintings and jewelry and anything else I could think to make, and started to surround myself with people who loved me and cared about me. Not a single person hated me because I was tall, or thought I was stupid for being an artist, and my first girlfriend thought it was pretty amazing that I was bisexual, and that I had the courage to just be myself.

Now, I have played music in over 30 states, had paintings hung and sold in galleries, owned an online business, and now work as an artist and musician, and am raising my beautiful son. I have a son now, and I don't want his school experience to be like mine. I want him to be able to learn in a safe space, and to be able to flourish and be himself without fearing for his life, or wanting to take his own life. I don't want him to cry the oceans of tears that I cried, over so many broken hearts throughout my short little life. And I want people to love each other, like I love them...just as they are.

Please, we are all so beautiful in our differences. I just want people to know that it doesn't have to be that way, and it shouldn't have to get better. We should be able to enjoy our lives. Not just our adult lives, but our childhoods too. I love all of you, and hope you have a wonderful day.

Also, heres a video of a blues song that I wrote recently. This one is for all my choir teachers and drama directors who told me my voice wasn't good enough. I sure showed them, didn't I ;)